The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq
by George Packer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $203
In the tense months of the winter of 2003, when preparations for the Iraq war were under way, George Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, weighed the pros and cons and came down pro-war - but only, he later said, 'by a whisker'.
With such thin support to begin with, it's not surprising that now, after 21/2 years of blunders and a grinding insurgency, Packer believes the war has turned into a disaster for Americans. But what about the Iraqis?
The fall of Saddam Hussein produced a much more complex picture, he writes. Despite the dashed hopes of many in the optimistic early days, Packer has not yet given up the belief that the designs of the war's architects might be realised in time.
Packer's history of the war, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq, invites comparisons with David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, the classic reconstruction of how America got into the Vietnam war. In this case the 'best and brightest' are the neoconservative intellectuals, abetted by Iraqi exiles in the US.